Chalumeau, Clarino, Altissimo
by Whyte Star
Summary: A Symphony AU. John is a self-taught clarinetist. Sherlock is the lead violinist of a privately-owned symphonic orchestra. When a position for a clarinet player opens in the symphony, John accepts.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: **I'm back from a long writing hiatus with an AU. This should be interesting. Slight warnings to PTSD. Be warned that I can be a stupidly slow updater, though I have about 1/3 of this fic complete already. Enjoy! (Also, apologies in advance if I muck up the clarinet something fierce. I've only ever attempted to play it once.)

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><p>She is so beautiful, a masterpiece in black and silver, and John feels his breath catch in his throat. Seeing her again after so long . . . it feels like the first time all over again. He reaches out a hand tentatively, placing his fingers against the crushed velvet she is nestled in, a beautiful shade of midnight blue.<p>

_Judette. _

He pieces her together in his mind's eye, can almost hear her beautiful voice in his ears.

His fingers trace along the smooth curve of her bell, and he dances them along to caress her two joints, upper and lower. Looking closely, he can see his reflection in her fine pieces of silver, and almost loses himself in them, staring. She waits every so patiently, as beautiful and as perfect as the day he left her. His fingers ghost along her body, afraid that any real touch will cause her to dissolve before his very eyes.

"Hullo, Judette."

She does not respond, save a slight glimmer of light off her keys. She will never speak unless spoken to—or rather, spoken _through._

He removes a small box from her case, turning it over once or twice in the fingers of his right hand. He opens it gently, and removes from it a single woodwind reed. It feels so delicate in his hands, his _soldier's hands . . ._

He dampens the reed in his mouth, experiencing all over again its peculiar taste, and it evokes emotions in his chest that he thought were long dead. Holding the reed gently between his lips, he reaches with a trembling right hand and plucks the mouthpiece from its crevasse in the case. Next comes the barrel, the joints, the bell, and finally the ligature as John Watson pieces together his beloved clarinet for the thousandth time, but also for the first time.

Judette the clarinet. No one alive has never known—and will never know-that he has given a name, nearly a _personality,_ to a musical instrument. She has been his partner for nearly ten years now, the last in a line of clarinets that have occupied his hands since adolescence, and none of them could hope to match her. She was the first woman to steal his heart, and the only woman who cannot break it.

She feels heavier in his hands than he remembers—or maybe it is the physical and metaphorical burdens he carries that weigh her down. A smile breaks the lines of his haggard face as he looks at her, whole and complete. He cradles the clarinet in his hands and she falls into place beneath his fingers with the grace of two lovers in a gentle embrace. It is more than just muscle memory—she has become an extension of him, a piece that is both a part of him and greater than him.

The mouthpiece feels somewhat foreign on his lips, large and almost cumbersome, but the tender weight against his bottom lip is reassuring, a comforting touch. His heart is beating with so much force that he can feel it in his ears, and his entire body is shaking in pain, anticipation, _need._

He draws a shaking breath and plays the first note he has played on her in over sixteen months, and a dreadful squeak assaults his ears. He flinches, but does not abandon the endeavor. He takes a moment to adjust he embouchure he has lost, and tries again.

The note he plays is an open G, the most basic note, the tuning note. There is a slight tremble in the sound as his lips remember their familiar position, and his musician's ear tells him that he is dreadfully flat, but for that one moment he ignores it all. He simply sits and listens to Judette's voice, and emotion rushes through him like a torrent—it is like seeing an old friend again after many years away, a moment filled with love and beauty and so many feelings that he can't hope to put words to them all.

For the first time in many weeks he is suddenly free of the images that haunt him when he closes his eyes, of the sounds that follow him even in silence. For that moment he can forget about the war, and he feels almost human again.

So he simply plays; he plays until he is out of breath and it feels like his chest may explode and he pulls his mouth away from the clarinet, gasping for air, looking every bit the part of a disheveled lover after a passionate kiss.

He listens to the sound reverberate, though the acoustics are not good in this dingy old flat, and the horrible paisley wallpaper swallows the sound before he can truly enjoy it.

The emptiness it leaves behind is almost painful. He is shaking, his arms numb, tears standing in his eyes.

The note he plays is an open G because he can barely hold the instrument in his shaking hands.

_Doctor John Watson went to war a whole man and came home in pieces._

The note he plays is an open G because he can't close the fingers on his left hand for the pain, for the nerve damage in his left shoulder, for the damnable bullet that carved a path just inches from his heart and tore his metaphorical heart out with its passage.

_He can put the pieces of his clarinet together, but he can't hope to piece himself back together._

The note he plays is an open G because he is afraid it is the only note he will ever be able to play again.

He raises the clarinet to his lips and plays the note again. Judette seems to respond to his intentions in the way no person could-_bless her soul,_ he thinks—because it is the most mournful note he has ever heard.

_TBC_


	2. Chapter 2

**WARNING: **There is self-harm in this chapter.

**Chapter 2**

His physical therapist tells him that the prognosis on his shoulder is good; it is likely he will regain ninety percent or more of his strength and motion. She tells him this with a half-smile and a tone he knows so well: an empty platitude. It is something he has done before: _you'll be okay, soldier, even though if I move my hand your guts will spill out onto the sand. You'll be okay, soldier, even though there is nothing I can do for you. You'll be okay, soldier; that is the only thing I can say to you. _

The pain is unbearable on his best days and horrifying on his worst; it is as vivid and as real as being shot all over again. During his sessions, he endures it all with the outward stoicism of a soldier. In the solace of his flat he lies on his back, his wounded arm dead at his side, and he cries. They are sobs that wreck him, leave him shaking and nauseous and suffocate him under the weight of his own grief.

At night he dreams. At night the sand is bright and hot and the bullets fly around him. At night the soldiers die before him again and again and he can do nothing to help them because his arms are heavy and numb and he cannot feel his hands. At night, the hostile bullet slams into him and his body explodes as if he were made out of glass, and he falls forward through the bloody sand, falling and falling and falling into an expanse of darkness that is cold and malicious and filled with screams and…

After he flings himself from a nightmare one night with screams loud enough to wake the neighbors and finds himself on the floor dripping in sweat, he decides to see a therapist.

Twenty minutes into their first session he is already regretting his decision. He feels exposed, stark naked, baring his private and innermost thoughts to a total stranger. He closes himself off from her, keeping himself at a distance. John watches her as she writes—she always holds her notebook at such a peculiar angle, almost as if inviting him to read it. She suggests to him that he try writing a blog at the same time that she writes _trust issues_ on her notepad and underlines it once.

That night he sits at his laptop, staring at the screen. He'll clumsily type a word one-handed, stare at a half-formed sentence, and delete it all with an exhale of frustration. For two hours at least he fights with himself; how can he hope to put to words something that defies description?

After the second hour he gives up, closing the laptop with an indignant huff.

His eyes flicker over to his clarinet, and she speaks to him, speaks to him in that language that defies translation: the language of the soul.

She is not as heavy in his hands this time, though she trembles in time with his unsteady grip. The fingers of his right hand find their place without hesitation, but his left hand fumbles around the keys, fingers searching clumsily for purchase.

He begins to play a chromatic scale in severely slow fashion, taking minutes or more to force his unsteady fingers into the proper position. It is a painful process, as painful as his therapy, and he can feel the tears collecting in the corners of his squinted eyes.

He lets the notes tell his story, articulate his fear, his grief, his hope, his desires, his pain. The notes are clumsy, but they mean more to him right now than all the empty platitudes and the sympathetic looks and the meaningless words on paper.

Judette sings the throaty chalumeau notes with ease. John's concentration is absolute as he wills his left thumb with what seems to be every ounce of his strength to press the register key. The moment is awkward and tenuous, but in a breath he crosses the break to the clarino register, where the notes are bright like the trumpet of their namesake. He holds the note, the middle B, relishing its sweet tone. When at last the note fades off, he listens with his eyes closed, and there is a smile on his face.

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><p>Every day he attends physical therapy, and every day after physical therapy he returns to his flat and plays the clarinet. In the beginning he can barely hold Judette long enough to finish a chromatic scale. He'll push himself harder and harder until he's halfway through the third register and his arm will just give out and collapse like a dead thing, and he'll sit there sucking air through his teeth to quell the pain in his shoulder. He won't be able to feel his fingers for an hour, and he'll sit there the entire time with the clarinet lying helplessly across his lap, staring at her and mourning as if she were somehow broken.<p>

On one occasion he is finally able to complete a chromatic scale, both ascending and descending, but as he plays the final note he loses his grip on Judette as his shoulder seizes up again, and she falls from his suddenly numb hands and clatters across the floor.

The sound of her fall is as deafening as the AK-47 that suddenly fires inches from his face and embeds bullets in the wall at his back. He throws himself to the floor, eyes suddenly wide, senses alert. There is an injured soldier barely an arm's length away, reaching out to him with his mouth open as if to scream, but not a single sound escapes his lips and he is staring at John with vacant black eyes.

John is choking on sweet taste of lead and the smoke is thick around him, and he is leopard crawling toward the wounded man when the air around them flashes white and hot and his cry of surprise is deafening in the sudden vacuum of sound.

When he returns to himself some time later—minutes, hours, _days—_the first thing he sees is Judette. He is prone on the floor, and she is inches from his nose. He struggles to his knees, but the action requires an ungodly amount of effort. He rests on his hands and knees for a moment, staring at the floorboards, breathing deeply to get the smell of copper out of his nose, the sickening taste of gunpower from his mouth.

Time is elastic. He does not know and does not care how long he sits there memorizing the grain in the wood floorboards, tracing each line with his eyes, trying to bring his focus back. He remains frozen in this position until his left arm begins to tremble uncontrollably beneath him.

It is when he is reaching for Judette that he notices the blood.

Four ragged gashes on his right arm that start at the back of his hand and trace their way in a sickening sort of spiral toward the inside of his elbow. He drags his eyes toward his left hand and sees stains of red on his fingertips, under his nails.

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><p>For nearly a week he cannot touch Judette, afraid that if he does she will shatter like glass like he does in his dreams, afraid that touching her again will trigger memories he thought he had locked away. The wounds on his arm likely won't leave scars, and already they are beginning to fade to a muddy pink color, but he wears his jumpers even in the warmth of summer in a futile attempt to hide them.<p>

When he finally gathers the fortitude to put the clarinet together again, she responds to his touch with no memory of previous events. He plays tentatively, waiting for the flashbacks, but none come. As Judette's voice grows stronger so does his own confidence.

He tries the first bars of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, Allegro, transposed for Bb clarinet. His tempo, however, is far from allegro, and if Mozart is not turning in his grave over the horrendous rendition of his work, then John considers himself a lucky man.

His therapist notices some subtle change in him during their next session. When prompted, he simply states that he is reconnecting with a dear, old friend.

Over the course of the next six weeks, as his control of his hand continues to improve, he masters the first section of the concerto, playing it over and over again until he is satisfied that it is perfect. It is around this time that he begins to receive notes on his door requesting that he _Please stop the racket,_ or the occasional _If you don't stop playing that damn thing I'll break in your door and snap your fingers._ He gives each note a cursory glance when he receives it, only to crumble each and throw it in the bin without another thought.

There is still an intermittent tremor in his hand. His physical therapist tells him it will abate as his strength returns; his therapist believes it is a part of his PTSD, his body's response to the memories of the war that haunt him even in broad daylight.

What they do not see is what happens with Judette.

He is playing _Allegro_ again, pouring his life into the middle section. He is making his way through the delicate notes, seeing and hearing and _feeling_ nothing but the music, and his hand is perfectly steady, his fingers moving as one with the clarinet. He approaches a run of notes and hits every one, his fingers moving with dexterity that only weeks ago seemed impossible. The music calls for a crescendo and he grows with it. He hits the final note in the run and falters for a moment—_that damn hand_—but he rights himself and holds the note a bit longer than the score calls for, giving in to his own selfish desire to listen to the clarinet sing for as long as he possibly can.

Six months after picking up his clarinet again, his physical therapist reports that he has made progress faster than she thought possible. John thanks her, but doesn't _really _thank her.

He thanks Judette.

_TBC._


End file.
